Does S&T2009 Know How to Do Laundry (or: How to run more advanced POI searches)

So tonight we zipped off to the local coin-operated laundry to wash some of our large blankets only to find that it had gone out of business. Thankfully, I had taken my laptop with me for entertainment, so I was able to load Microsoft Streets and Trips 2009 to try to find another laundry. However, I was unable to make it cough up any info on this kind of stuff. DeLorme Street Atlas 2009, on the other hand, knew of dozens of laundries throughout the city (though sadly none proved to be open at 9pm on a Saturday).

Does Streets & Trips 2009 not have as much data about "non-trip-related" businesses as Street Atlas 2009 does, or was I simply not asking S&T2009 the right question?

Delorme Street Atlas includes Yellow Pages data, while Streets & Trips does not. That probably explains the discrepancy.

Mom-and-pop laundries are probably not going to be in the Navteq POI database.

S&T can do an online lookup in Microsoft Bing Maps. This doesn't help you when offline, since you can't bulk-download the data.

I just got back from a 3 week trip from CA to FL and back.
While Streets & Trips 2009 is powerful and very useful in many respects, I found it terrible at helping me locate specific things near me FAST.
It was so painstaking to choose a radius, have the area be a huge fat circle I did not need, or a long massive snake along my entire route of 3000 miles.
How about a NEAR ME RIGHT NOW NMRN setting?

I need to find a Safeway a Wells Fargo a Landromat, an Italian Restaurant NMRN!
I don't give a crap about fancy grid patterns which only show POIs if I am zoomed in at a specific level and that I have to click on each one individually to see what the heck it is.

I just gave up, pulled out my blackberry and used Google Maps.
Hello! Find Nearby... Yes, magically it shows red POIs around my current position and whether it's pizza, thai, laundromat, bank, it just works.
I can view as dots or a text list based on distance from me.

Why is this so hard on S&T? Am I doing this all wrong?

I don't use S&T much. Garmin's nav programs default to "Near Current Location" (aka your NMRN). You can override that and make it "Near Other Location" and select that other location on the map. Or you can force it to "By Name" and type the name of a specific POI.

...ken...